Video: Communicating news to students

Now that we have our syllabus posted, the next thing we want to do is to be able to communicate directly to all the students inside of our class. And to do this, we are going to use the latest news block in the upper right-hand corner of our course. Now the nice thing about the latest news block is that anytime you add a new news topic, it's automatically going to be emailed out to all of the students in your class, giving a direct line of communication straight up to your students. So to do this simply click on the Add a new topic link in the Latest news block, and you are asked to provide a Subject for your message. In this case we want to tell of the students, they should make sure that they read Chapter 1 before coming to the first class.

Moodle is an online tool that allows educators to interact with students outside the classroom and manage a course from anywhere. In Moodle Essential Training for Teachers, Chris Mattia shows how this program works for teachers on three levels: disseminating information, creating a forum where ideas are exchanged, and assessing the progress of students. Chris shows how to build course materials with Moodle's HTML editor, post assignments, and save time by using Moodle's grade book to evaluate tests automatically and organize scores. Exercise files accompany the course.

Topics include:

Installing and configuring Moodle

Preparing media files for distribution inside a Moodle course

Posting instructions on the course home page

Setting up course-specific glossaries and databases

Building assignments students can complete online

Using Moodle's built-in email and discussion boards

Creating a wiki inside Moodle for students to build and contribute content

Communicating news to students

Now that we have our syllabus posted, the next thing we want to do is to beable to communicate directly to all the students inside of our class. And to dothis, we are going to use the latest news block in the upper right-hand corner of our course.Now the nice thing about the latest news block is that anytime you add a newnews topic, it's automatically going to be emailed out to all of the studentsin your class, giving a direct line of communication straight up to yourstudents. So to do this simply click on the Add a new topic link in the Latestnews block, and you are asked to provide a Subject for your message. In thiscase we want to tell of the students, they should make sure that they readChapter 1 before coming to the first class.

The subject will say Read Chapter 1 before the first class. Now for the Messagewe'll go ahead and type in a little bit more description. You should alreadyhave read chapter 1 of the text before coming to the first class. Now we wantto emphasize before, so we go ahead and Double-click before and we are going toclick the Bold button, so that it's highlighted a little bit, so it really letsthe students know that we are emphasizing this.

We'll go ahead and scroll down in the window, the format of this is going to beHTML; every one is subscribed to this forum. If we wanted to attach a document,we could do so right here by simply clicking the Browse and following the samesteps that we did for posting the syllabi. I'll check the box it says Mail nowand that will send an email out to all of the participants in the class, withthis message, as well as posting it to the news forum.So let's go ahead and click the Post to forum button. This post will be emailedout to all subscribers and it automatically refreshes us back to the main course.

We can now see that in the latest news block, we have a new postingthis listed here that says Read chapter 1 before the first class, there is alink for more that students can read more information.They can also get to this news forum, by simply clicking on the News forum linkhere, in the header block. We'll go ahead and click that link, so we can seewhat the News forum looks like.We can see that there is a discussion setup, what the topic was, this is amessage of our post, we can see who it was started by. There is our icon thatwe posted inside of our profile picture. No one has replied. If students wantedto they could log in and they could post questions directly here into the forum.

We'll go into that in the Forum section, but for now just know that you areable to post information to the News forum, and have it go directly out to your students.Let's go ahead and return back to the course, by clicking on the BIOL432 linkin the upper-left, and next we'll go in and learn how to manage the files andfolders that are going to have a lot more content that's going to show upinside of our main course.

There are currently no FAQs about Moodle 1.9 Essential Training for Teachers.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

Already a member ?

Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
Learn more

Upgrade to our Annual Premium Membership today and get even more value from your lynda.com subscription:

“In a way, I feel like you are rooting for me. Like you are really invested in my experience, and want me to get as much out of these courses as possible this is the best place to start on your journey to learning new material.”— Nadine H.

Thanks for signing up.

We’ll send you a confirmation email shortly.

Sign up and receive emails about lynda.com and our online training library:

new course releases

newsletter

general communications

special notices

Here’s our privacy policy with more details about how we handle your information.

Keep up with news, tips, and latest courses with emails from lynda.com.

Sign up and receive emails about lynda.com and our online training library:

new course releases

newsletter

general communications

special notices

Here’s our privacy policy with more details about how we handle your information.